UP FRONT: WORTH NOTING

UP FRONT: WORTH NOTING; You Mean Hudson County Is Actually Counting Votes?

By Barbara Fitzgerald

Published: June 8, 2003

Unofficial election results from the primary election on Tuesday show that the longtime Democrat leader Joseph V. Doria lost his Assembly seat by a razor-thin margin of 500 votes to Louis Manzo.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Doria -- a fixture at the State House since he was first elected to the Assembly in 1979 and still mayor of Bayonne -- is challenging the results. This is Hudson County, after all.

Ever since the days when the legendary Frank Hague ruled the Democratic Party and controlled the county, election results in Hudson have been a source of jest, becoming an institutional feature of joke-swapping at the annual Correspondents Club dinner.

Brendan Byrne, the former governor, has long quipped that they don't count votes in Hudson County, they just estimate them. Reached by telephone last week, he said he recalled hearing once that during the Hague days ''they stopped counting the votes until they knew how much they needed'' to win.

That is why the official results in Hudson County will probably be challenged in court and why the official results of the election may not be known for some time. Barbara Fitzgerald

Photo: Joseph V. Doria may soon be known only as Mr. Mayor. (The New York Times)